India's Ravichandran Ashwin has impressed in the short form of the game and will play a key role in the Tests against England. Photo: Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images

If Ravichandran Ashwin, India's surprisingly tall, surprisingly subtle, surprisingly callow incumbent Test off-spinner, feels an undue weight of pressure to play a key role in the impending four-match series against England, this is perhaps an example of how a potent sporting history can also become something of a burden.

For the past half-century India has been fixed in the cricketing mind as a land of twirling, looping, dust-choked misdirection, home not just to assorted slow bowling giants but also to an endlessly recycling sub-strata of finger-ripping tyros. During the 1970s India could field at least four Test-class spinners of varying genres. A generational lull the following decade was reversed gloriously by the emergence of Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh, statistically the most productive spin-bowling pair in the history of Test cricket.

There is misdirection here too: behind this headline double act there has remained a sense of a wider shrivelling away. The engaging Ashwin may yet go on to be an excellent Test spinner. A bowler of notable – if not notably pronounced – variation, he currently has 49 wickets in eight Tests, including an impressive 12 for 85 in an innings victory against New Zealand in Hyderabad in August. The alluringly flighty left-arm spinner Pragyan Ojha is also likely to play in the first Test in Ahmedabad, and may yet prove the biggest threat to England's batsmen over the course of four Tests.

But beyond these two there is no significant depth. The presence of Harbhajan in the Test squad is tribute to his competitive heart but also to the basic lack of anybody else knocking about making a case for selection. Piyush Chawla might have been preferred if he were totally fit, a one-time prodigy whose main weapons are a skiddy persistence and a slightly over-exposed googly, Kumble without the height or gravitas.

Indeed the shadow of Kumble in particular still looms; India's own back-of-the-hand Glenn McGrath, who stands third on the all-time Test wicket-takers' list and who alongside Harbhajan provided a perhaps misleading sense of enduringly potent Indian spin. Outside these two, India's spinners have made a rather peripheral impression in recent decades: a touch of Ravi Shastri, a smidgeon of Maninder Singh, the brief starbursts of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Narendra Hirwani, and in the past 15 years assorted bit parters slotted into the occasional gaps left by the Kumble-Harbajhan steamroller, outside of whom it is necessary to go back to the early 1980s to find a specialist Indian spinner with 100 Test wickets (England have had four since the start of the 1990s).

None of which is intended to vanquish memories of a spin-shaded victory in England in 1986, the multiple tortures of the 1993 whitewash in India, or even the meekest of collapses against Harbhajan at this year's World Twenty20. But the fact is this is a key series not just for the reconstruction of that immovable batting order, but for the question of whether India is indeed going to continue to produce great Test match spinners.

If there is added interest here it is that Ashwin and Ojha are both products at this level of Twenty20 cricket: traditionally the enemy at the gates of the more attritional arts, but here something of a feeder format and, in Ashwin's case, a defibrilating influence on a cricketer who seemed to have rather stalled.

A career that had seemed in danger of congealing – Ashwin made his first-class debut for Tamil Nadu in 2006 – receiving a spectacular reignition with Chennai Superkings in 2010. Dropped from the Indian Premier League team in 2009 and reduced to watching the tournament at home with his family, Ashwin returned with a striking intensity the following year. "I took it with both hands. I took it head-on. I was like someone that was very hungry and prepared to hunt on an island," he has said. Opening the bowling, he ended up both 2010 player of the tournament and recipient of the Golden Wicket for most prolific bowler. In January the following year Chennai renewed his contract for a dizzying US$850,000 (£530,000). Elevated to India's elite Twenty20 fraternity and fiscally secure after what must rank among the most monetarily productive three weeks of any cricketer's life, Ashwin had become, without particularly asking for it, a modern cricketing phenomenon.

Now for the transition: a one-day international debut arrived in June 2010 and a Test debut 18 months later against West Indies. An intense, physically rather mooching figure, Ashwin's chief attribute to date had been his variation, most notably the self-taught carrom ball that has proved so useful against batsmen committed to attack in Twenty20. He gets bounce, bowls a strangulating quicker ball and has, if the talk is anything more than just talk, been perfecting a non-chuck doosra of his own devising, released with a flick of the thumb and bent middle finger.

Twenty20 may have launched him but there is still the sense Ashwin may prove equally suited to the longer form. He is, for all the talk of variations, essentially an orthodox bowler with a clean action, as pointed out recently by Graeme Swann, whom Ashwin cites as a bowling hero. He already has a fine Test record in India, winning a man of the series award after his debut against West Indies (Ashwin also scored a Test hundred in Mumbai) before going on to experience a chastening tour of Australia that winter, taking nine wickets at 62.77 in two Tests, a reliance on beating the batsman off the pitch rather than through the air exposed on unresponsive pitches.

It is something Ashwin has since been working on. Fittingly for a man with a BTec in IT, there is something pleasantly nerdish about his dedication to exploring mechanical properties of his trade, a sense of a man who sees spin bowling as much as a physical science as an art form. "Ten years down the road, we may come across many deliveries that none of us would have ever seen," Ashwin has said. "It's all innovation. Somebody gets a spark and thinks and executes it."

Currently it is England, in Swann and Monty Panesar, who have on paper the stronger spin-bowling attack. Home conditions – not to mention the relative expertise of both sides against spin – will more than balance things out in a series that offers, for the Ashwin-Ojha axis, a chance to provide an echo of a slow-bowling dynasty not so much in decline as reduced in the past decade to a receding double-point.

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